Boring Job

[wheypat]

Today I met a man who has, I think, the most boring job I've ever seen. Well, apart from security guards.

His job is to print off all the meetings for all the rooms in the office. Then put them into the holders outside the rooms. Then he spends his day walking around the rooms, checking that they are occuiped for the duration of the meeting OR you chage the room's status to available if your meeting ends early. If you don't comply he emails you and raises a demerit. 3 in a quarter and you loose meeting room booking rights.

He starts at the top of the building and works to the bottom. Then gets back in the lift and repeats.

One of his colleagues has another dull job. She walks round the building looking at screens which are not locked and you get a warning if you leave you desk unlocked. Again, 3 strikes and its discipline time.

How dull can a job get?

[AleisterCrowley]

At least there's a change of scenery involved
I once had a job (for a few days) drilling holes in shower cubicle edging strips. 8 hours stood in same spot doing load, press button, 'bzzzzztttt', remove, stack.
I almost went mad.

[ReformedCharacter]

Today I met a man who has, I think, the most boring job I've ever seen. Well, apart from security guards.

His job is to print off all the meetings for all the rooms in the office. Then put them into the holders outside the rooms. Then he spends his day walking around the rooms, checking that they are occuiped for the duration of the meeting OR you chage the room's status to available if your meeting ends early. If you don't comply he emails you and raises a demerit. 3 in a quarter and you loose meeting room booking rights.

He starts at the top of the building and works to the bottom. Then gets back in the lift and repeats.

One of his colleagues has another dull job. She walks round the building looking at screens which are not locked and you get a warning if you leave you desk unlocked. Again, 3 strikes and its discipline time.

How dull can a job get?

Factory work. All day working in a factory in Germany taking stacks of printed paper from a pallet and putting them onto a table to be loaded by someone else into a machine to produce travel magazines. At least that factory had dispensing machines that served cold bottles of beer. I also worked loading boxes of cereal into a lorry all day long. Not as bad as working for Amazon from what I hear.

RC

[Slarti]

Factory bakery, night shift.

Jamming doughnuts for a 12 hour shift. Pick 2 of the conveyor, press onto jam injector nozzles until your thumbs press the buttons to inject the jam. put down on other conveyor, repeat ad nauseum. Oh, and jet it wrong and you inject jam into yourself, which happened a couple of times at about 05:00 as my brains were giving up.

I can't even stand the smell of a doughnut to this day.


Slarti

[Howyoudoin]

Today I met a man who has, I think, the most boring job I've ever seen. Well, apart from security guards.

His job is to print off all the meetings for all the rooms in the office. Then put them into the holders outside the rooms. Then he spends his day walking around the rooms, checking that they are occuiped for the duration of the meeting OR you chage the room's status to available if your meeting ends early. If you don't comply he emails you and raises a demerit. 3 in a quarter and you loose meeting room booking rights.

He starts at the top of the building and works to the bottom. Then gets back in the lift and repeats.

One of his colleagues has another dull job. She walks round the building looking at screens which are not locked and you get a warning if you leave you desk unlocked. Again, 3 strikes and its discipline time.

How dull can a job get?

Both of those jobs are done by people in my office that have many other duties during their working day. The former is done by one of the Reception staff, the latter by someone in Compliance.

I fail to see how either of the jobs you describe could ever be considered a 'full time' 9 to 5 job. Not in the private sector anyway.

Therefore, i'm guessing that these people work for the Civil Service. Am I right?

HYD

[bungeejumper]

My first day's work, pushing the buttons in the lift in a department store. It was the last Saturday of the sales, and the shop was crammed with people, and I was under strict instructions to go up one floor at a time, to the very top of the building, and then down one floor at a time......

And then up one floor at a time and down one floor at a time.....

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Fortunately, there was eventually a fist-fight between the people wanting to go up and the people going down, which did help to liven things up a bit.

It just happened to be the store which David Croft would eventually immortalise in Are You Being Served? I could recognise several of my past co-workers in the series, especially the characters for Captain Peacock and Mrs Slocombe. They kept me sane. Almost.

BJ

[tea42]

My wife once nursed a lady whose job was packing custard sachets. When my wife enquired if the job was boring the lady replied "Oh no, sometimes we get put on jellies"

[Watis]

My wife once nursed a lady whose job was packing custard sachets. When my wife enquired if the job was boring the lady replied "Oh no, sometimes we get put on jellies"

Sometimes it's good to have low expectations . . .

Watis

[CryptoPlankton]

A fair bit of a machinist's work can be boring...

[UncleEbenezer]

Factory work.
RC

Exactly. Chaplin, Modern Times. Dickens, not just Hard Times. Or the summer job that funded my studies.

I expect the majority of all jobs since the Industrial Revolution brought us the beginnings of employment-as-we-know-it-today have been more boring than the OP's description. I guess the OP says something about how-the-other-half-live.

[nmdhqbc]

Must have had a very good work life there if you think that's a boring job. I've had some humdingers. Stuffing envelopes, wrapping parcels, making boxes, sorting post. Maybe get into come min wage jobs to have your eyes opened.

[CryptoPlankton]

Working on an oilfield can be boring too.

[Howyoudoin]

Working on an oilfield can be boring too.

The similar joke told at the Fringe this year (posted by Itsallaguess on Laughing Lemons) was nearly identical except that the punch line was 'It was well boring', which makes more sense for us thickies.

HYD

[CryptoPlankton]

Working on an oilfield can be boring too.

The similar joke told at the Fringe this year (posted by Itsallaguess on Laughing Lemons) was nearly identical except that the punch line was 'It was well boring', which makes more sense for us thickies.

HYD

I'll content myself with the thought that the machinist one was too subtle then...

[wheypat]

I fail to see how either of the jobs you describe could ever be considered a 'full time' 9 to 5 job. Not in the private sector anyway.

Therefore, i'm guessing that these people work for the Civil Service. Am I right?

HYD

You may very well say that, I couldn't possibly comment

[ReformedCharacter]

Factory work. All day working in a factory in Germany taking stacks of printed paper from a pallet and putting them onto a table to be loaded by someone else into a machine to produce travel magazines. At least that factory had dispensing machines that served cold bottles of beer.
RC

It did have a few memorable moments though...

I worked in the factory with a couple of friends; if you worked really fast you could pile up the paper such that the person who removed them could not quite keep up, leaving perhaps 20-30 seconds 'spare'. It was then tempting to sit on the pallet until there was sufficient room on the table to continue work. The factory was almost entirely populated with foreign workers with the exception of the foreman who was small and had a hunchback. The foreman did not appreciate people who sat down on their pallets even for 20 seconds when there was nothing to do.

One morning, one of my companions who was working a couple of aisles away and rapidly getting fed up with the job overdid his consumption of the cold beers from the vending machine and sat down on his pallet. Sometime between beer 3 and 4 he got into an altercation with the foreman about sitting down while waiting for work. I couldn't actually see my friend from my aisle but could hear the conversation. A few minutes later my friend was heard shouting 'Sheister Meister!' and was shortly afterwards escorted to the exit. I didn't last much longer.

RC

[Howyoudoin]

Working on an oilfield can be boring too.

The similar joke told at the Fringe this year (posted by Itsallaguess on Laughing Lemons) was nearly identical except that the punch line was 'It was well boring', which makes more sense for us thickies.

HYD

I'll content myself with the thought that the machinist one was too subtle then...

Ah, the old 'tell the same joke with one or two words changed and see if they notice the difference' trick.

Are you Squiffs in disguise?



HYD

[bungeejumper]

As a student, I once worked on the Dairy Box production line at Cadburys, where about 20 women sat beside a conveyor belt for nine hours a day - each one of them dropping a particular chocolate into a particular part of the plastic liner tray as it went past their noses. Thousands of times a day.

It was beyond boring: most of them could have done this precision job with their eyes completely closed. They kept themselves half-awake by chatting endlessly about television, television, sex, more sex and more television. And these poor creatures were likely to continue with that job day in, day out, for five, ten or maybe fifteen years.

My own job was a bit more interesting. As a teenage toughie, I was in charge of collecting the piled-up pallets of chocs from the factory floor and making sure that they never ran out of stuff to put in their liner trays. One day, I dropped half a tonne of strawberry creams (which very nearly killed me, but that's another story). The line had to be stopped for half an hour while we shovelled up the mess. The ladies gave me a huge round of applause for bringing a bit of variety to their day.

Then it was back to the usual eight to six normality. I have no idea how they stood it.

BJ

[CryptoPlankton]

The similar joke told at the Fringe this year (posted by Itsallaguess on Laughing Lemons) was nearly identical except that the punch line was 'It was well boring', which makes more sense for us thickies.

HYD

I'll content myself with the thought that the machinist one was too subtle then...

Ah, the old 'tell the same joke with one or two words changed and see if they notice the difference' trick.

Are you Squiffs in disguise?



HYD

Thanks for the wake up call...

[StepOne]

In the eighties the yellow pages had a category called 'Boring' and all it said underneath was 'See Civil Engineers'.